Wild: Creating Your Own Renewal Rituals

A new movie was released this week called Wild, featuring an excellent lead actress performance by Reese Witherspoon. Witherspoon plays writer Cheryl Strayed, who published the bestseller memoir Wild in 2012. Strayed has commented this week that she hadn't planned for her book to be a self-help book, but has noticed that it has hit an inspirational chord with many women.

Strayed's book portrays her as a flawed protagonist. She is at a transition point in her life: her marriage is ending, she's trying to give up her drug use, and she's never grieved the loss of her mother. She decides to hike the 1,000 mile Pacific Coast Trail, by herself. The journey gives her time to think and to process what has happened in her life, as well as challenge herself in very difficult conditions. The hike turns out to be transformational in her life. After she returns, she goes on to become an author, teach writing, remarry and raise a family of her own.

Wild lets the reader or movie fan watch the unfolding of Cheryl Strayed' s testing her own limits, learning about herself, and the emotional process of letting go of her marriage and her mother. The movie features Laura Dern in a standout performance as Cheryl's mother.

Wild has similar themes to Joan Anderson's 1999 book A Year by the Sea, where she tells of her year in a cottage at Cape Cod as she lives alone and takes a break from her long-term marriage to learn about herself. Anderson steps away from the busyness of her regular life and roles to do some important self-discovery. She realizes that in fulfilling her roles as a wife and mother, (and once her boys were raised) that her own hopes and dreams had been overtaken by those of others. In rediscovering herself, Anderson finds her true nature and new possibilities for her life. Anderson is just a more traditional woman, with a discovery journey that comes later in life, after raising her family.

Both books explore the value of women taking their own journey of self-discovery, outside of their relationships to other people. Women can be so focused on pleasing and caring for others that they don't have an opportunity to consider the dictates of their own heart. Learning to be alone with yourself and enjoy your own company is important, even if you don't want to hike the Pacific Coast Trail by yourself.

Men as well as women can benefit from the idea of taking on a challenge after going through a life transition or ending. After the end of a close relationship, or the end of a chapter of your life, setting  a new goal for yourself to work towards could allow you a positive focus and a chance to reflect, integrate and grow. We all need to develop our own personal rituals for self-renewal, and cultivate the ability to be alone without being lonely. Your own self-renewal can be different than Cheryl's or Joan's, but you can use their journeys for inspiration.

Tiny Beautiful Things

On a recent cross-country flight, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Cheryl Strayed's new book, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar (Vintage Books, 2012). Strayed is the author of the current New York Times list bestseller, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Rim Trail. This book is a collection of her heartfelt responses to letters she has received as the advice columnist for The Rumpus, an online literature community.

Strayed deeply absorbs, wrestles with, and responds to the life and relationship dilemmas her readers write in with. She bravely opens up and shares some of her own personal tragedies and triumphs as well. People write to Sugar, and open up about dealing with the death of a loved one, betrayal by their partner, their career dreams and aspirations, settling for things and relationships for security, family troubles, sexuality, and a myriad of other topics. It's an anonymous forum for deeply personal dialogue and soul-searching.

While the responses are at times peppered with blue language, the answers are real, deep, and show her warmth and hard-won wisdom from being informed by her own life experiences. Strayed lost her mother to illness as a young adult. She married young and was divorced by 26. She remarries later, and survives her husband’s affair. She struggled to become a writer, with waitressing jobs, mentoring at-risk teens, teaching anger management to low-income families, teaching memoir writing, and lots of other adventures along the way. She is the mother of two children.

Strayed strikes just the right tone of radical compassion, acceptance, vulnerability, and challenge. She understands, but she encourages the writer (and us as readers) to stretch to become our biggest self.

Take this advice Strayed gives to a man after the end of his 20 year marriage, when he is struggling with whether or not to love the woman he is involved with a few years later, “Do it. Doing so will free your relationship from the tense tangle that withholding weaves. Do you realize that your refusal to utter the word ‘love’ to your partner has created a force field all its own? Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel...Don't be strategic or coy...Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word 'love' to all the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will...We're all going to die. Hit the iron dinner bell like it's dinner time.”

Strayed's admonitions to her memoir writing class are profoundly true on multiple levels. “You get no points for living, I tell my students. It isn't enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn't anecdote. It’s the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by what the story means.” I feel the same way as a therapist and life coach, as I help clients try to integrate their experiences into their current life, and cull the meaning from their own life's chapters.

There are a number of bittersweet sections in the book, like when Strayed reflects on her sense of wonder about life. You never know who will be in your life forever, and who will just be there for a while. As she points out, sometimes the people we start out thinking are going to be there with us forever don't end up being there. It’s also very surprising the people that show up in our lives and play a meaningful role when we didn’t expect them.

The final letter in the book, written by a 22-year old, is worth buying the book for. The writer asks for wisdom from Strayed about what she would write to her younger self, if she got the chance. It's funny, but it's also very honest. Stop worrying about being fat. Don't lament about your career so much; you have a life, not just a career. You can't convince people to love you. Either they love you or they don't. Resolve what childhood wounds you can in your 20s, knowing you'll have to go back and resolve more of them later as your life evolves. Watch your assumptions about other people, as they are often wrong. Do the work you’re supposed to be doing. My favorite, the very last piece of advice in the book, is to take the winter coat your mother bought you. Don't critique the coat. It may be very precious if it’s the last gift she gives you, because, in an autobiographical note, she may be dead by spring. Say thank you.

I fell in love with Sugar. I think you might, too. Cheryl Strayed's perspective is funny, honest, and speaks to the best self in each of us. The idea of writing a letter to your younger self is a particularly valuable one that just could help us offer ourselves guidance from our own earlier life lessons.